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Eminem Reasserts His Core Values

Maybe there should never have been room for Eminem in the first place.

Just over a decade ago he emerged as an unlikely worldbeater: a white rapper from Detroit with a vexatious obsession with violence and social dysfunction. His pop megasuccess was serendipitous, explicable by no common measuring sticks.

Certainly, in the rear view, it’s tempting to see Eminem’s ascendance as a fluke, never more so than now, several years past his commercial peak. On Monday he released “Recovery” (Aftermath/Interscope), his sixth solo album on a major label, his first album as a sober man and the most insular of all his releases.

In many ways, the Eminem captured on “Recovery” is reminiscent of the artist he once was, before the world got hold of him. He still has the familiar preoccupations: cartoonish gore, sexual aggression, astonishingly intricate rapping. He sounds far more invigorated than on anything he’s released since 2002, the year of his last strong album, “The Eminem Show,” and the soundtrack to the quasi-biopic “8 Mile.”

For the first few years of his fame Eminem, born Marshall Mathers, exerted a gravitational pull on pop and was impossible to emulate, making him only more powerful. But over the last few years, as he retreated into drug-fueled isolation, Eminem — one of the most crucial figures in pop culture in the last 20 years, who pushed hip-hop over the final hump to mainstream acceptance — has been a nonentity.

In 2010 he’s a true anomaly, neither an integral part of the pop landscape nor of the rap landscape. He’s become a multimillion-selling cult figure, trafficking in a peculiar style that once transfixed the world but now feels anachronistic.

“Recovery” could have been an opportunity for re-evaluation or redefinition, a record that would steer Eminem into new, possibly difficult topical terrain. But instead he’s used it as a platform to reassert his core values, stripped clean of the self-induced trauma of recent years.

Even he knows how much damage he’s done to his reputation. “Them last two albums didn’t count,” he raps on “Talkin’ 2 Myself.” “ ‘Encore’ I was on drugs, ‘Relapse’ I was flushing them out.”

Photo

Eminem at the Grammy Awards in January.Credit
Matt Sayles/Associated Press

What’s left behind is the same petulant child he’s always been, the one that was rescued and polished up by Dr. Dre and subsequently sustained by critical adulation, financial success and self-medication.

Were this same album to come from a new artist, it would be met with head scratching and possibly derision, but for Eminem it’s merely charmingly bare-bones.

First and foremost Eminem’s rapping has survived largely intact, still a wondrous thicket of internal and complex rhymes that come off as feats of athleticism as much as language. Take this tightly packed run from “No Love”:

Cold hearted, from the day I Bogarted the game, my soul started to rot, fellow

When I’m not even at my harshest, you can still get roasted cause Marsh is not mellow.

Throughout “Recovery” he is practically panting from rapping at such a frenzied clip. This is redolent of Eminem circa 1997-98 — before the whimsical accents and cadences — just as his Slim Shady alter ego was being formed, when wordplay mattered far more than subject or tone.

That propensity can be a liability too. Just because words rhyme doesn’t mean they should. On “Not Afraid,” the first single, he catalogs his climb back to sobriety but doesn’t know when to duck a shoddy double entendre:

The way I feel, I’m strong enough, to go to the club or the corner pub

And lift the whole liquor counter up

Cause I’m raising the bar.

Thankfully, there are just a handful of his quickly outmoded pop-culture references on this album: — Michael Vick, Brooke Hogan, David Carradine, David Cook. (What, nothing rhymed with Kris Allen?) A decade ago they marked Eminem as a provocateur willing to take on enemies. Now they suggest he’s become a passive and sluggish consumer of pop culture. Even the tongue-in-cheek infomercial spots for “Recovery,” starring ShamWow/ Slap Chop spokesman Vince Shlomi, feel like shtick.

What Eminem hasn’t let go of is his taste for melancholic bombast in production. The beats here, especially the rock-tinged ones by DJ Khalil and a pair from Boi 1da, who brought serrated textures to Drake’s recent debut album, feel no more vibrant than anything Eminem has rapped over since Dr. Dre was supplying him with ornate, swinging production early in his career.

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Eminem with Jay-Z at a baseball game in Detroit in May. The two rappers will share a pair of concert bills in September.Credit
Rebecca Cook/Reuters

And that’s for the worse, especially given how notably different he sounds when the beat beneath him is optimistic. “W.T.P.,” produced by Supa Dups, is out of place here, a slinky, up-tempo number, but it forces Eminem into lighter, more flexible rhyme structures. It’s the most alive he sounds on this album.

Still, even here he’s frustratingly limited in his topical range. And given all his life changes in the last few years, it’s notable how few new shades of personality he shows on “Recovery.” Post-rehab Eminem isn’t that different from pre-rehab Eminem. He’s always been quick to eviscerate himself, so hearing him say on “Going Through Changes,” “I walk around the house trying to fight mirrors/I can’t stand what I look like,” isn’t much of a surprise.

Where Eminem goes one step deeper is on “Talkin’ 2 Myself,” recounting how his reliance on drugs led him to consider taking shots at Lil Wayne and Kanye West and took away the one thing that his rapping had never lacked for: confidence.

I’ve turned into a hater

I put up a false bravado

But Marshall is not an egomaniac, that’s not his motto

He’s not a desperado, he’s desperate

His thoughts are bottled.

Otherwise the only moments of stretching here come on a pair of songs — “So Bad,” “Seduction” — on which he takes a crack at flirtatiousness, with awkward results. Listening to them makes it clear that Eminem, at 37 one of the most freakishly gifted technicians in rap history, still has almost no sense of how to age gracefully.

And in less competitive waters that might be less of a problem. But today in hip-hop, the most popular rappers are also the best: Lil Wayne, who appears on this album; Jay-Z, with whom Eminem will share a pair of concert bills in September; even lesser stars like Cam’ron, Fabolous and Rick Ross

When Eminem first appeared, he was a curio, inspiring both fierce culture wars and fawning notice from critics eager to call him something greater than a mere rap star. He was more than happy to oblige, even if it meant getting lost along the way.

But today more than ever being a mere rap star is multilayered, complicated work. It’s just the type of thing this fiery white rapper from Detroit might eventually be great at.

A version of this review appears in print on June 22, 2010, on page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Eminem Reasserts His Core Values. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe